<b>Kishore Singh:</b> Whatever you do is nothing at all

The author is talking about a patient's life

The doctor was explicit with his instructions: “Stay at home, absolutely no reading or writing till I say so, no TV, and avoid the sun.” “Well, he didn’t say anything about rest,” my wife pointed out to me, when I wondered whether I should be putting away the family’s woollies under her coaxing. “If you’re going to lie about at home all day,” she insisted, “you might as well make yourself useful.” So, I packed away my wife’s silks and replaced them with chiffons and cottons. I segregated my son’s suits and coats that needed to go for dry-cleaning from those that he hadn’t used over Delhi’s short winter. I struggled to pack my daughter’s 178 winter dresses, 65 short crop jackets, 22 pairs of boots, and various pieces of apparel that apparently justified their use in the cool season but not in spring or summer. When it was all done, I could find no place for my own sweaters and shawls, and my wife complained to her friend Sarla that I had too many clothes and she had herself a task taking care of them.

Seeing that I could be gainfully employed around home, my wife commanded me to set up appointments with the plumber and electrician so that various tasks that had not been attended to over several months could be speedily expedited. I aired quilts and blankets and sorted unmatched crockery, adding or getting rid of table mats and napkins. I looked for pairs of mismatched socks, segregated table linen and matched towel sets, and disposed off wine glasses and coffee mugs that were missing partners. 

I squared domestic accounts that hadn’t been matched in a long while, made Excel sheets of advances and loans taken by the staff, filed away insurance certificates, processed applications for our change of address four years after we’d moved home, sequenced all EMI payments, paid my wife’s credit card bills, paid my son’s credit card bills, paid my daughter’s credit card bills, enhanced our broadband connection, discovered that our tenants hadn’t renewed their lease, ordered my daughter’s cheque books, followed up on my son’s reversal of credit from his hotel that hadn’t been reversed in five months, discovered that the electricity bill hadn’t been paid by our Man Friday though he’d taken cash for the purpose, applied for the renewal of my wife’s driving licence, applied for my son’s Schengen visa, applied for the renewal of my daughter’s passport, paid my son’s mobile bill, paid my wife’s mobile bill, paid my daughter’s mobile bill, but forget to pay my own mobile bill and found its services, embarrassingly, discontinued. 

My wife said she couldn’t stand the sight of me sitting about at home when I should have been at office, so decided to make herself scarce, finding, in the three weeks since my surgery, the opportunity and occasion to attend 14 birthday parties, seven marriage functions, a couple of all girls’ lunches, two picnics, and invite home her clients for dinner because, she said, that way she could “keep an eye on me”.

She told Sarla that it was an ordeal looking after a husband who required nursing, and she was tired from running chores for me. “All day, it’s fetch me this, or get me that, or cook me something nice,” she cribbed, even though I thought I’d been an exemplary patient. “It would be okay,” she told Sarla, “if he made himself useful, but all he does is hang around doing nothing at all.”